Fellowship / Fellows

Manuel Vargas

  • 2008–2009
  • Humanities
  • University of San Francisco
Headshot of Manuel Vargas
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Manuel Vargas is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco. His research concerns moral psychology and moral agency, especially in connection with the problem of free will and moral responsibility. He also writes on various topics within Latin American philosophy.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Vargas will be working on a book about the structure and justification of moral responsibility, or the general conditions under which we rightly or wrongly blame agents for their actions. He aims to address various philosophical challenges to the possibility of genuine moral responsibility, and also recent challenges to the possibility of responsibility (and free will) from social psychology and neuroscience.

Vargas received a joint PhD in philosophy and humanities from Stanford University. He has held visiting appointments at the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology. He has also been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and Faculty Research Award, the first American Philosophical Association Prize in Latin American Thought, and the NEH Chair in the Humanities at the University of San Francisco. Along with John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, and Derk Pereboom, Vargas is a coauthor of Four Views on Free Will (Blackwell, 2007).

For more information, see “Quick Study: Manuel Vargas RI ’09.”

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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